Wireless wide area networks (WANs) pose considerable problems to providing efficient and reliable transport connection protocol (TCP) connectivity between a mobile device and an Internet service. A wireless connection can be unreliable and may frequently be lost due to poor wireless reception, lack of wireless coverage, a drained battery (in the mobile device), wireless WAN congestion, and other similar reasons. Additionally, the available bandwidth for a wireless connection is typically low (e.g., 20-30 kbps in 2.5G networks) and latency is typically high (e.g., greater than 700 ms in 2.5G networks).
When a wireless connection is lost while transferring a file or posting a photo from a camera-enabled phone to a blog, for example, the wireless connection needs to be re-established to complete the wireless transfer. In such a case, the wireless transfer needs to be re-started from the beginning after the wireless connection is re-established when the connection is lost. If the wireless connection is then lost multiple times, the wireless transfer has to be started over from the beginning multiple times in order to complete the transfer.
Binary large objects in a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) message can be separated utilizing SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) which then uses Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to package the XML and binary parts of the SOAP message for transfer. A SOAP message requires base64 encoding and the MIME encoding format allows for the transmission of binary rather than base64 encoded data. With MTOM, the base64 encoded binaries that are part of a SOAP message packet are transmitted separately. The MIME protocol is used to separate and then combine the separate binaries and the SOAP message. However, the MIME encoding format creates large encoded files which transfer slowly and are subject to interruption when a wireless connection is lost.